Bowling in your living room with Wii

Ever feel like staying home instead of going to the bowling alley to bowl? Well, with the bowling video game produced by Wii Sports you can do just that.

Wii Sports is a collection of five sports simulations with a Wii controller designed with motion-sensing capabilities to give the players a true to life feel for the real game. The five sports included are tennis, baseball, golf, boxing and—you guessed it—bowling, all designed to run on the Nin-tendo Wii game console.

The Wii Sports bowling game was developed and produced by Nintendo. The games are Bruns-wick Pro Bowling, Ten Pin Alley 2, AMF Bowling: World Lanes, and AMF Bowling: Pinbusters.

Tailor your game

In the bowling games, one to four players use the Wii controller to mimic actions performed in real life—such as the arm motion involved in delivering a bowling ball. The Wii bowling games can be tailored to your every whim and fancy. You can select your own high-powered bowling ball or, if you are the conservative type, you can simply pick a house ball.

Before actually selecting a ball, the game lets you know the hooking potential and breakpoint of the ball and whether to use it on dry, medium or oily lane conditions. You can switch balls in the middle of the game just like in real bowling. The game also lets you know what oil pattern you are bowling on.

A feature you might like is that you can tailor make the bowler you want to be. For example, you can pick your hair color, shirt, pants, shoes, hat and even your personality. You can even choose your race and whether you want to be a girl or a boy.

The game also lets you choose what venue you want to bowl in. You can select bowling centers Las Vegas, Hollywood, Malaysia or the Wild West.

Time to bowl

After you have made all those choices, it’s time to bowl. You line up your shot using the Wii remote control and pick the ball you want to use. To deliver the ball you must swing your arm in a motion just like in real bowling and release the bowling ball, which in Wii, is a button on the con-troller.

The controller is so sensitive it will notice the force of your arm swing, your hand position and turn of the ball, all of which impact the speed and path of the ball down the lane.

No need to take a full approach unless you really want to. One step will do, much like the fabled one-step approach used by the legendary hustler Count Gengler, one of the greatest bowlers that ever lived.

Back in the 1920s and 30s, the mysterious Count quietly toured the country, enticing bowlers into big-money matches with his non-threatening one-step delivery. His delivery was so precise that it has been said that he once rolled a 300 game in the dark and was one of the most accurate bowl-ers in history. When asked why he was called “Count” he would reply that after the matches it was he who would count the money.

Popularity of Wii Sport

Wii Sports is the bestselling video game of all time, with 50 million copies sold worldwide, as of March. Wii Sports has been featured on television in Wii commercials, news reports, and other programming. The game has become a popular means for social gatherings and competitions among players of varying ages.

Gil Sanchez, a member of the Bowling Writers Association of America and the USBC Advisory Council, is a freelance bowling writer for the News & Messenger. Reach him at 703-587-6792 or at .